hagiography [hag-i-og-răfi] Writing devoted to recording and glorifying the lives of saints and martyrs. This form of Christian propaganda was much practised in the Middle Ages but has few modern literary equivalents apart from Bernard Shaw’s play Saint Joan (1923). By extension, the term is now often applied to modern *biographies that treat their subjects reverentially as if they were saints. A writer of such works is a hagiographer. Adjective: hagiographic.
haiku [hy-koo] A form of Japanese *lyric verse that encapsulates a single impression of a natural object or scene, within a particular season, in seventeen syllables arranged in three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. Arising in the 16th century, it flourished in the hands of Bashō (1644–94) and Buson (1715–83). At first an opening *stanza of a longer sequence (haikai), it became a separate form in the modern period under the influence of Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902). The haiku *convention whereby feelings are suggested by natural images rather than directly stated has appealed to many Western imitators since c.1905, notably the *Imagists. See also tanka.
Further reading: Stephen Addiss, The Art of Haiku (2012).
• Site of the Haiku Society of America.
half-rhyme An imperfect *rhyme (also known by other names including near rhyme and slant rhyme) in which the final consonants of stressed syllables agree but the vowel sounds do not match; thus a form of *consonance (cape/deep). For the variant form of half-rhyme employing ‘rich’ consonance, in which the preceding consonants also correspond (cape/keep), see pararhyme. Employed regularly in early Icelandic, Irish, and Welsh poetry, half-rhyme appeared only as an occasional *poetic licence in English verse until the late 19th century, when Emily Dickinson and G. M. Hopkins made frequent use of it. The example provided by W. B. Yeats and Wilfred Owen has encouraged its increasingly widespread use in English since the early 20th century. See also eye rhyme.
hamartia The Greek word for error or failure, used by Aristotle in his Poetics (4th century bce) to designate the false step that leads the *protagonist in a *tragedy to his or her downfall. The term has often been translated as ‘tragic flaw’, but this misleadingly confines the cause of the reversal of fortunes to some personal defect of character, whereas Aristotle’s emphasis was rather upon the protagonist’s action, which could be brought about by misjudgement, ignorance, or some other cause. See also hubris, peripeteia.
hapax legomenon A now archaic term of scholarly commentary derived from the Greek (‘once-only expression’) and applied to a word or phrase of which only one recorded example has been found, also known as a *nonce word.
hard-boiled A term applied both to a certain kind of detective character, usually a world-weary private investigator, and to a special tradition of American *detective story in which these characters are prominent, sometimes also known as ‘tough-guy’ fiction. The tradition of hard-boiled fiction, often contrasted with the gentility of the *Golden Age tradition, arose from the violent short stories of the popular magazine Black Mask in the 1920s, and flourished from the 1930s to the 1950s in the hands of Dashiell Hammett (as in The Maltese Falcon, 1930), Raymond Chandler (as in The Big Sleep, 1939 and Farewell, My Lovely, 1940), and Mickey Spillane (as in Kiss Me Deadly, 1952). These works are realistic in their presentation of the underworlds of urban crime and in their avoidance of far-fetched methods of murder, and they are fatalistic in their assumption that everybody is either corrupt or readily corruptible, with only the ‘hard-boiled’ hero, e.g. Sam Spade in the stories of Hammett, holding to an individual code of integrity. This solitary investigative hero, sometimes allied with an alluring ‘dame’, is typically pitted against a shadowy group that enjoys protection from powerful quarters, and he will take violent and illegal measures to outwit it. See also noir.
Further reading: Sean McCann, Gumshoe America (2000).
Harlem Renaissance A notable phase of black American writing centred in Harlem (a predominantly black area of New York City) in the 1920s. Announced by Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro (1925), the movement included the poets Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay, continuing into the 1930s with the novels of Zora Neale Hurston and Arna Bontemps. It brought a new self-awareness and critical respect to black literature in the United States.
Further reading: George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995).
Hellenistic The term designating a period of Greek literature and learning from the death of Alexander the Great (323 bce) to that of Cleopatra (31 bce), when the centre of Greek culture had shifted to the settlements of the eastern Mediterranean, notably the great library of Alexandria. This period includes the poetry of Callimachus and Theocritus, the philosophy of Epicurus and the Stoics, and the scientific achievements of Aristarchus, Archimedes, and Euclid (see also alexandrianism). A Hellenist is a student or admirer of Greek civilization, or, in a special sense promoted by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869), a devotee of Hellenism (the life of intellect and beauty), which Arnold contrasted with Hebraism (the life of moral obedience) in his sketch of the two contending ideals within Western culture. Phrases or constructions derived from the Greek language (e.g. hoi polloi) are also called Hellenisms.
Further reading: Kathryn Gutzwiller (ed.), A Guide to Hellenistic Literature (2006).
hemistich [hem-i-stik] A half-line of verse, either standing as an unfinished line for dramatic or other emphasis, or forming half of a complete line divided by a *caesura. In the second sense, the hemistich is an important structural unit of the early Germanic *alliterative metre. In verse drama, *dialogue in which characters exchange short utterances of half a line is known as hemistichomythia (see stichomythia). Adjective: hemistichic.
hendecasyllabics Verses written in lines of eleven syllables. Hendecasyllabic verse is found in some ancient Greek works, and was used frequently by the Roman poet Catullus. The hendecasyllable or *endecasyllabo later became the standard line of Italian verse, both in *sonnets and in *epic poetry, and was also used by some Spanish poets. It is very rare in English, although Tennyson and Swinburne attempted imitations of Catullus’ *metre, as in this line from Swinburne’s ‘Hendecasyllabics’ (1866):.
Sweet sad straits in a soft subsiding channel
hendiadys [hen-dy-ă-dis] A *figure of speech described in traditional *rhetoric as the expression of a single idea by means of two nouns joined by the conjunction ‘and’ (e.g. house and home or law and order), rather than by a noun qualified by an adjective. The commonest English examples, though, combine two adjectives (nice and juicy) or verbs (come and get it). Shakespeare uses this figure quite often in his later works, as in the first part of this line from Hamlet:.
The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind
heptameter [hep-tamm-ĕt-er] A metrical verse line composed of seven feet (see foot). In the context of English verse, in which a heptameter is a seven-stress line, it is often referred to as a *fourteener. It is sometimes known as a septenary. Examples of English poems written in heptameters include William Blake’s ‘Holy Thursday’ (1789) and Louis MacNeice’s ‘Bagpipe Music’ (1937).
heptastich [hep-tă-stik] A poem or *stanza of seven lines, such as the *rhyme royal stanza. Also known as a *septet.
hermeneutic circle A model of the process of interpretation, which begins from the problem of relating a work’s parts to the work as a whole: since the parts cannot be understood without some preliminary understanding of the whole, and the whole cannot be understood without comprehending its parts, our understanding of a work must involve an anticipation of the whole that informs our view of the parts while simultaneously being modified by them. This problem, variously formulated, has been a recurrent concern of German philosophy since the work of the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher in the early 19th century. The writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer in the 1960s tackled a similar hermeneutic circle in which we can understand the present only in the context of the past, and vice versa; his solutions to this puzzle have influenced the emergence of *reception theory.
hermeneutics The theory of interpretation, concerned with general problems of understanding the meanings of texts. Originally applied to the principles of *exegesis in theology, the term has been extended since the 19th century to cover broader questions in philosophy and *criticism, and is associated in particular with a tradition of German thought running from Friedrich Schleiermacher and Wilhelm Dilthey in the 19th century to Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer in the 20th. In this tradition, the question of interpretation is posed in terms of the *hermeneutic circle, and involves basic problems such as the possibility of establishing a determinate meaning in a text, the role of the author’s intention, the historical relativity of meanings, and the status of the reader’s contribution to a text’s meaning. A significant modern branch of this hermeneutic tradition is *reception theory. See also phenomenology.
Further reading: Peter Szondi, Introduction to Literary Hermeneutics (1995).
hermeticism [her-met-iss-izm] A tendency towards obscurity in modern poetry, involving the use of private or occult *symbols and the rejection of logical expression in favour of musical suggestion. Hermetic poetry is associated primarily with the French *Symbolists and the poets influenced by them, notably the Italians Giuseppe Ungaretti, Eugenio Montale, and Salvatore Quasimodo, who are sometimes grouped together as exponents of ermetismo.
hero (heroine) The main character in a narrative or dramatic work. The more neutral term *protagonist is often preferable, to avoid confusion with the usual sense of heroism as admirable courage or nobility, since in many works (other than *epic poems, where such admirable qualities are required in the hero), the leading character may not be morally or otherwise superior. When our expectations of heroic qualities are strikingly disappointed, the central character may be known as an *anti-hero or anti-heroine.
heroic couplet A rhymed pair of iambic *pentameter lines:Let Observation with extensive View
Survey Mankind, from China to Peru
(Johnson)
heroic drama A kind of *tragedy or *tragicomedy that came into vogue with the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660. Influenced by French classical tragedy and its dramatic *unities, it aimed at *epic (thus ‘heroic’) grandeur, usually by means of *bombast, exotic settings, and lavish scenery. The noble hero would typically be caught in a conflict between love and patriotic duty, leading to emotional scenes presented in a manner close to opera. The leading English exponent of heroic drama was John Dryden: his The Conquest of Granada (1670–71) and Aureng-Zebe (1675) were both written in *heroic couplets.
Further reading: Derek Hughes, English Drama, 1660–1700 (1996).
heroic poetry Another name for *epic poetry. The kind of verse line used for epic poetry in a given language is known as the heroic line: the dactylic *hexameter in Greek and Latin, the iambic *pentameter in English, the *alexandrine in French, the *hendecasyllabic line in Italian. The heroic quatrain or heroic stanza is not used for epics, but is so named because it employs the English heroic line: it consists of four pentameters rhyming abab, as in Gray’s ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751), or aabb.
heteroglossia The existence of conflicting *discourses within any field of linguistic activity, such as a national language, a novel, or a specific conversation. The term appears in translations of the writings of the Russian linguistic and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), as an equivalent for his Russian term raznorechie (‘differentspeechness’). In Bakhtin’s works, this term addresses linguistic variety as an aspect of social conflict, as in tensions between central and marginal uses of the same national language; these may be echoed in, for example, the differences between the narrative voice and the voices of the characters in a novel. Adjectives: heteroglot, heteroglossic.
heterometric Varied in *metre. The term is applied to *verse forms and *stanzas or *strophes in which lines of different lengths are found, usually arranged in a consistent order of variation and rhyming pattern (although verse in *open form is also by definition heterometric, as are some unrhymed forms including the *haiku). Some kinds of poem, such as the *limerick, the *clerihew, and the standard form of the *ballad, are expected to be heterometric; and variation in line length is often found in the *ode. Certain stanza forms, including the *Burns stanza, the *Spenserian stanza, and the quatrain in *common measure or *short measure, display heterometric patterns. The opposite kind of poem or stanza in unvaried metre is called *isometric. Noun: heterometry.
hexameter [hek-samm-ĕt-er] A metrical verse line of six feet (see foot). Its most important form is the *dactylic hexameter used in Greek and Latin *epic poetry and in the elegiac *distich: this *quantitative metre permitted the substitution of any of the first four dactyls (and more rarely of the fifth) by a *spondee, and was *catalectic in that the final foot was either a spondee or a *trochee. Although successfully adapted to the stress-based metres of German, Russian, and Swedish verse (by, among others, Goethe and Pushkin), the dactylic hexameter has not found an established place in English or French verse, except in some rather awkward experiments such as A. H. Clough’s The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich (1848), from which this hexameter comes:This was the final retort from the eager, impetuous Philip.
hiatus [hy-ay-tus] 1. A break in pronunciation between two adjacent vowels, either within a word (forming two distinct syllables, as in doing, rather than a *diphthong as in joint) or between the end of one word and the beginning of the next (e.g. the expense rather than the *elision of th’expense). 2. Any gap or omission in a sentence, verse, or logical argument. See also diaeresis, ellipsis, lacuna.
higher criticism The name given in the 19th century to a branch of biblical scholarship concerned with establishing the dates, authorship, sources, and interrelations of the various books of the Bible, often with disturbing results for orthodox Christian dogma. It was ‘higher’ not in status but in the sense that it required a preliminary basis of ‘lower’ *textual criticism, which reconstructed the original wording of biblical texts from faulty copies.
histoire [ees-twah] The French word for story or history, used in modern *narratology to denote the *story, that is, the narrated events as distinct from the form of *narration in which they are presented: thus the histoire is the sequence of narrated events as reconstructed by readers in a chronological order that may differ from the order in which the *plot arranges them (see also fabula). In another sense, linguists have used the term to designate an apparently ‘objective’ way of relating events without *deixis, that is, without reference to the speaker or writer, to the auditor or reader, or to their situation, as in most kinds of historical writing and *third-person narrative; in this sense, histoire is contrasted with *discours. See also énoncé.
historical novel A *novel in which the action takes place during a specific historical period well before the time of writing (often one or two generations before, sometimes several centuries), and in which some attempt is made to depict accurately the customs and mentality of the period. The central character—real or imagined—is usually subject to divided loyalties within a larger historic conflict of which readers know the outcome. The pioneers of this *genre were Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper; Scott’s historical novels, starting with Waverley (1814), set the pattern for hundreds of others: outstanding 19th-century examples include Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris (1831), Dumas père’s Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844), Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862), and Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1863–9). While the historical novel attempts a serious study of the relationship between personal fortunes and social conflicts, the popular form known as the historical or ‘costume’ *romance tends to employ the period setting only as a decorative background to the leading characters.
Further reading: Jerome de Groot, The Historical Novel (2009).
historicism An intellectual tendency, found in philosophy, sociology, and many other disciplines since the 19th century, that stresses the importance of historical contexts to the understanding of any social or cultural phenomenon; in particular it insists that the meanings and values of human artefacts and systems of thought are to be understood in relation to the historical circumstances of their production, and not according to later (especially present-day) standards. Historicism is thus in this narrow sense the theory of historical relativism, and a vigilant opponent of *anachronism. In a broader sense, the term is applied to any emphasis upon the importance of historical explanations or historical understanding in general. Thus in literary contexts a historicist approach to poetry, for example, is one that starts from an attempted historical account of the production and reception of poems at a given time, not from a description of a given poem’s formal or aesthetic features. The verb historicize means to place anything within its historical contexts. The school of literary and cultural study known since the 1980s as *new historicism is not simply a renovated kind of historicism.
Further reading: Paul Hamilton, Historicism (1996).
history play A play representing events drawn wholly or partly from recorded history. The term usually refers to *chronicle plays, especially those of Shakespeare, but it also covers some later works such as Schiller’s Maria Stuart (1800) and John Osborne’s Luther (1961). In a somewhat looser sense, it has been applied also to some plays that take as their subject the impact of historical change on the lives of fictional characters: David Hare’s Licking Hitler (1978) has been reprinted with two other works under the title The History Plays (1984).
Further reading: Matthew H. Wikander, The Play of Truth and State: Historical Drama from Shakespeare to Brecht (1986).
hokku Another name for a *haiku, originally applied to the first *stanza in a longer poem known as a haikai, before the haiku became an independent form.
holograph A document written entirely in the author’s own handwriting. Adjective: holographic.
Homeric [hoh-merr-ik] Characteristic of or resembling the Greek *epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey (c.8th century bce), which are by custom attributed to ‘Homer’, a figure about whom nothing is known. For Homeric simile, see epic simile; for Homeric epithet, see epithet. The Homeric Hymns are a group of 33 ancient Greek poems of various dates from the 8th century bce onwards and of unknown authorship (although some were formerly attributed to Homer); they celebrate the qualities of various Greek deities, sometimes in the form of prolonged *invocations.
homily A sermon or morally instructive lecture. An author of homilies is a homilist, while the art of composing homilies is known as homiletics. Adjective: homiletic.
homology A correspondence between two or more structures. The Marxist critic Lucien Goldmann developed a theory of the relations between literary works and social classes in terms of homologies. In his Le Dieu Caché (1959), he observed a homology between the underlying structure of Racine’s tragedies and that of the world-view held by a particular group in the French nobility. This method was extended to the modern novel in Goldmann’s Pour une sociologie du roman (1964). An example of something that bears a resemblance to something else is called a homologue, and is said to be homologous with it.
homonym A word that is identical in form with another word, either in sound (as a *homophone) or in spelling (as a homograph), or in both, but differs from it in meaning: days/daze, or lead (guide)/lead (metal), or pitch (throw)/pitch (tar). Identity of form between two or more words is known as homonymy. Adjective: homonymic.
homophone A word that is pronounced in the same way as another word but differs in meaning and/or in spelling; thus a kind of *homonym. Examples of this identity of sound, known as homophony, include maid/made and left (opposite of right)/left (abandoned). Homophony is often exploited in *puns. Adjective: homophonic.
homostrophic Composed of *stanzas that all share the same form, with identical numbers of lines of corresponding lengths, and with identical *rhyme schemes. Nearly all stanzaic verse is homostrophic. The term is used chiefly to distinguish the *Horatian ode, which is homostrophic, from the *Pindaric and irregular ode forms, which are not.
Horatian Characteristic of or derived from the work of the Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 bce), usually known as Horace. The Horatian ode, as distinct from the *Pindaric ode, is *homostrophic and usually private and reflective in mood: Keats’s odes (1820) are English examples of this form. Horatian satire, often contrasted with the bitterness of *Juvenalian satire, is a more indulgent, tolerant treatment of human inconsistencies and follies, ironically amused rather than outraged. Pope’s verse satires, some of them directly modelled upon Horace’s work, are generally Horatian in tone. For Horatian epistle, see epistle. See also ode, satire.
horizon of expectations A term used in the *reception theory of Hans Robert Jauss to designate the set of cultural norms, assumptions, and criteria shaping the way in which readers understand and judge a literary work at a given time. It may be formed by such factors as the prevailing *conventions and definitions of art (e.g. *decorum), or current moral codes. Such ‘horizons’ are subject to historical change, so that a later generation of readers may see a very different range of meanings in the same work, and revalue it accordingly.
horror story A kind of fictional narrative designed to inspire feelings of revulsion in its readers. Since the late 18th century, before which there were no horror stories in the modern sense, a distinction has been recognized between stories of this kind that rely upon physical horror and ‘tales of terror’ that inspire a more psychological apprehension and suspense, although in practice the boundaries have proved hard to draw. In general, the tale of terror is devoted to the evocation of the ghostly or supernatural (see ghost story, fantastic), while the horror story focuses upon the violation of physical taboos. The typical materials of horror fiction are decomposing corpses (rather than ethereal ghosts), vermin, bodily mutilations or tortures, monstrous transformations, cannibalism, blood-sucking, incest, and the great empire of slime. *Gothic fiction is commonly although not necessarily horrific in these terms, as in some episodes of M. G. Lewis’s novel The Monk (1794). Vampire fiction, which originated in 1819 with John Polidori’s story ‘The Vampyre’ and achieved its classic form in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), is a mild *subgenre within the horror tradition, tinged with fetishistic eroticism. The mainstream is occupied by tales of grave-robbing and the violation of corpses, as in the central episodes of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818; rev. 1831), and of monstrous reversions, as in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The American author H. P. Lovecraft invented his own fantastical subgenre, relying upon a bombastic mythography of primeval slime. For one psychoanalytic theory (by no means universally credited) of such effects, see abjection. See also grotesque, grand guignol.
Further reading: David Punter, The Literature of Terror (2nd edn 1996).
hubris [hew-bris] (hybris) The Greek word for ‘insolence’ or ‘affront’, applied to the arrogance or pride of the *protagonist in a *tragedy in which he or she defies moral laws or the prohibitions of the gods. The protagonist’s transgression or *hamartia leads eventually to his or her downfall, which may be understood as divine retribution or *nemesis. Hubris is commonly translated as ‘overweening (i.e. excessively presumptuous) pride’. In proverbial terms, hubris is thus the pride that comes before a fall. Adjective: hubristic.
Hudibrastic verse [hew-di-bras-tik] (Hudibrastics) A kind of comic verse written in *octosyllabic couplets with many ridiculously forced *feminine rhymes. It is named after the long *mock-heroic poem Hudibras (1663–78), a *satire on Puritanism by the English poet Samuel Butler. These lines from Canto III give some impression of the style:He would an elegy compose
On maggots squeez’d out of his nose;
In lyric numbers write an ode on
His mistress, eating a black-pudden;
And, when imprison’d air escap’d her,
It puft him with poetic rapture.
huitain [wee-ten] A French *stanza form consisting of eight lines of either 8 or 10 syllables each, usually rhyming ababbcbc or abbaacac. It may form an independent poem or part of a longer work such as a *ballade. The huitain was used by François Villon in his Lais (1456) and in his famous Testament (1461). In English, the stanza used earlier by Chaucer in his Monk’s Tale has the same form.
humanism A 19th-century term for the values and ideals of the European *Renaissance, which placed a new emphasis on the expansion of human capacities. Reviving the study of Greek and Roman history, philosophy, and arts, the Renaissance humanists developed an image of ‘Man’ more positive and hopeful than that of medieval ascetic Christianity: rather than being a miserable sinner awaiting redemption from a pit of fleshly corruption, ‘Man’ was a source of infinite possibilities, ideally developing towards a balance of physical, spiritual, moral, and intellectual faculties. Most early humanists like Erasmus and Milton in the 16th and 17th centuries combined elements of Christian and classical cultures in what has become known as Christian humanism, but the 18th-century *Enlightenment began to detach the ideal of human perfection from religious supernaturalism, so that by the 20th century humanism came to denote those moral philosophies that abandon theological dogma in favour of purely human concerns. While being defined against theology on the one side, humanism came also to be contrasted with scientific materialism on the other: from the mid-19th century onwards, Matthew Arnold and others (including the New Humanists in the United States, led by Paul More and Irving Babbitt in the 1920s) opposed the claims of science with the ideal of balanced human perfection, self-cultivation, and ethical self-restraint. This Arnoldian humanism, which has enjoyed wide influence in Anglo-American literary culture, is one variety of the prevalent liberal humanism, which centres its view of the world upon the notion of the freely self-determining individual. In modern literary theory, liberal humanism (and sometimes all humanism) has come under challenge from *post-structuralism, which replaces the unitary concept of ‘Man’ with that of the ‘subject’, which is gendered, ‘de-centred’, and no longer self-determining.
Further reading: Tony Davies, Humanism (2nd edn, 2007).
humours The bodily fluids to which medieval medicine attributed the various types of human temperament, according to the predominance of each within the body. Thus a preponderance of blood would make a person ‘sanguine’, while excess of phlegm would make him or her ‘phlegmatic’; too much choler (or yellow bile) would give rise to a ‘choleric’ disposition, while an excess of black bile would produce a ‘melancholic’ one. The comedy of humours, best exemplified by Ben Jonson’s play Every Man in His Humour (1598), and practised by some other playwrights in the 17th century, is based on the eccentricities of characters whose temperaments are distorted in ways similar to an imbalance among the bodily humours.
hymn A song (or *lyric poem set to music) in praise of a divine or venerated being. The title is sometimes given to a poem on an elevated subject, like Shelley’s ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’ (1816), or praising a historical hero, like MacDiarmid’s ‘First Hymn to Lenin’ (1931). The term hymnody is used to refer either to a particular body of hymns or to the art of hymn-writing, while a composer of hymns is called a hymnodist or hymnist. See also antiphon, ode, psalm.
hypallage [hy-pal-ăji] A *figure of speech by which an *epithet is transferred from the more appropriate to the less appropriate of two nouns: so at the eighth line of Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl’ (1956), which employs hypallage plentifully, the phrase ‘who cowered in unshaven rooms’ transfers the adjective unshaven from the people described to the rooms they occupied. Similarly in everyday speech, a person with a blind dog is more likely to be blind than the dog is. The term has sometimes also been applied to other constructions in which the elements of an utterance exchange their normal positions (see hyperbaton). Adjective: hypallactic.
hyperbaton [hy-per-bă-ton] A *figure of speech by which the normal order of words in a sentence is significantly altered. A very common form of *poetic licence, of which Milton’s Paradise Lost affords many spectacular examples:
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from th’ethereal sky
See also inversion.
hyperbole [hy-per-bŏli] Exaggeration for the sake of emphasis in a *figure of speech not meant literally. An everyday example is the complaint ‘I’ve been waiting here for ages.’ Hyperbolic expressions are common in the inflated style of dramatic speech known as *bombast, as in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra when Cleopatra praises the dead Antony:
His legs bestrid the ocean: his reared arm
Crested the world.
hypermetrical (hypercatalectic) Having an extra syllable or syllables in excess of the normal length of a specified metrical verse line. See also anacrusis, feminine ending.
hypertext A term used since 1965 in the discussion of computerized text, now referring to the realm of electronically interlinked texts and multimedia resources found on the World Wide Web (from 1990) and on CD-ROM reference sources. Hypertext is sometimes distinguished from ‘linear’ printed text in terms of the reader’s changed experience of moving around and among texts. In a different sense, the term is also applied, in discussions of *intertextuality, to a text that in some way derives from an earlier text (the ‘hypotext’) as a *parody of it, a sequel to it, etc.
Further reading: George P. Landow, Hypertext 3.0 (2006).
hypotactic Marked by the use of connecting words between clauses or sentences, explicitly showing the logical or other relationships between them: ‘I am tired because it is hot.’ Such use of syntactic subordination of one clause to another is known as hypotaxis. The opposite kind of construction, referred to as *paratactic, simply juxtaposes clauses or sentences: ‘I am tired; it is hot’. See also syntax.
hysterical realism A term coined by British critic James Wood in a review of Zadie Smith’s novel White Teeth in 2000 (since reprinted in Wood’s essay-collection The Irresponsible Self, 2004) and in some later articles, to describe an ambitious kind of late 20th-century *postmodernist novel that follows in the wake of *magic realism. Wood’s complaint against such novels by Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and Salman Rushdie is that they pursue ‘vitality at all costs’ through an unconvincing profusion of intertwined stories underpinned by minutely detailed research and involving ‘vivacious caricatures’ rather than credible human figures, all presented with a ‘false zaniness’ of style. Wood identifies the historical model for such fiction as the work of Charles Dickens, with its multitude of cartoonishly grotesque characters. Other critics in broad agreement have identified symptoms of this hysterical realism in the work of novelists not named by Wood himself, including Richard Powers and Dave Eggers. Zadie Smith’s own fiction since White Teeth has meanwhile shown a calmer tone of sobriety.